day for night, opening door?

I'm planning a tv spot for a sports bar/restaurant. The first shot is the marquis at dusk. the second shot is interior looking towards the front doors where people are entering. I think it needs to be day for night, (we're shooting in the a.m. before opening) but I don't have a lot to handle that. The sidewalk has a roof over it. I can rig a 12x12 solid 6 feet outside the doors, or will I need yards of duvetyne? Should I use a light or 2 gelled to mimic urban night outside, or just let it dark to not draw attention? I can't find too many examples of something like this for inspiration.

This is always an issue with day for night interiors. There's a few options but it really depends on what you are seeing outside the door/windows. You could tent the door. If there's an awning that buys you some space outside the door to hang some 20x20 solids (or whatever size you need) that usually helps. Or you could rent more speed rail and build a box to hang your rags from. This would allow you to add some units in your tent to sell that urban night spill or whatever it is you're going for. The problem with this whole technique, is that if you are seeing a fair amount of the "Outside" and it is tented, you just wind up looking into a big black void, which is usually less than ideal.

You would need some very large lights to sell the urban night gelled look outside while competing with the sun. You could underexpose the outside, but that means raising your ambience in the room considerably. Sometimes you can get away with putting nets over windows or back behind a window to knock down whatever it is you are looking at outside, but it is noticeable if it is in focus.

The lights I only meant to use under the tenting, I won't have to worry about the daylight otherwise. I've only done this thing on a small scale so I'm not sure how far away from the action at the door I need to keep the solids.

I'd love to see an example of this somewhere, then I could see what I could actually get away with.